blogging

What is a Blog?

There are chances that you know or at least have heard about blog, if you use Internet. Also known as online diary or journal, a blog can be public or private. Blogging first came into existence and became popular when individuals wanted to express their feelings. With time, blogging was started being considered as a unique tool to popularize businesses.

Use little skills and well-organized blog to help the growth of your business or to start a new business. You may want to know how it is possible. Though, people read and seek information, they still like the blogs that have entertainment, since it is similar to reading a person’s deep thoughts. You can encash this point and use your blog for attracting more reading and turning them into prospects of your web site. Just a random posting of blogs about your business would not help you in creating interest in the readers.

Weblogs are dated journals which are used by about 0.03% of the internet, yet they play a huge role in search results. To remove spam from search results, search engines have been relying heavily on links to organize search results. Weblogs generally consist of small posts with a few links in them. Some Weblogs allow users to post comments which link to their websites. Software systems such as Movable Type place these comments and trackbacks (references) in the same page as the post.

The internet was founded with the concept of the free flow of information. Good information has a tenancy to spread quicker than bad information. By reading other blogs you can expand your horizons and educate yourself further on that what interests you. You then can tell the world what your opinion is on the topic.

In addition to having a large link network setup, these bloggers are typically extremely opinionated people. The personal writing, close community feel about them, opinions of every nature, and the ability to leave instant feedback have caused these sites to leave a big footprint on the web.

Search engines want fresh new content. If you are strongly intertwined within the blogging community and you update your weblog every day, search engines will visit frequently. You can post a link to a new article or to any page you need quick indexing or re indexing. This will make testing and changing a rapid process. Essentially having a blog is like a free paid inclusion program for every site you will ever work on. You can also quickly change the format of your entire site in a matter of minutes with blogging software.

5 Advantages of Blogs

Blogs are probably the easiest way to have a website. With blog software, it literally takes minutes to have a professional looking site up and running. These are the five advantages of blogs:

1.Easy to create:

You don't need expensive or complicated web editors or web design software to create a blog. Blog vendors offer you a variety of templates you can choose from. Most likely you will find among them one that offers the look and feel you're looking for. Your only web design expense may very well be to pay a graphics artist to design an attractive logo that makes your site unique.

2.Easy to maintain:

Blog software allows you to post online, which means that you won't need to bother with FTP software. This also means that you can post anywhere, not just from your own computer. You may be anywhere in the world and if you have an internet connection you can log in and update your website from your web-based control panel. Your blog's software will automatically move your most recent post to the top, while archiving older posts by date or by topic, so you don't ever have to bother to move web pages around.

3.Blogs are search-engine-friendly:

Since blogs assign each post an individual URL address, each of them will have it's own, separate web page. If you take care of making each post very focused on a specific topic and carefully choose the keywords that best describe your post (using them in the post title and post body), they will stand a very good chance of ranking well with the search engines. Also, since blogs tend to be updated regularly, search engines will crawl them often (search engines love fresh content), adding your new posts to their index.

4.Blogs allow you to interact with your customer base:

The best websites allow your customers to interact with you and give feedback. Since blogs offer you the option of enabling a "comments" field after your posts where readers can give you feedback, your visitors will not only be more inclined to come back, but you will have at your disposal an effective and inexpensive way to get to know your customers better.

5.Many great blog hosts are free:

There are several excellent services that offer blog hosting for free. The most well known of them is Blogger, a free blog service owned by Google. Signing up takes minutes, it offers many different templates and customization options, and also gives you the option of tying your blog with your Google Adsense account. That way, not only is the service free, but you can also make money.

Note:- Before jumping to create a blog, remember that to be successful you must write about a focused and original topic, or offer a unique perspective on a common theme. In the end, as the cliche says, it all boils down to quality content.

Blogging Tips

Blogs are online diaries where the webmaster, or "blogger", can post comments, articles or links to other pages. Blogging software makes updating blogs very easy, either through a web interface, by email or using FTP programs. Since blog postings are organized in reverse chronological order, once a new post is added it automatically moves to the top and the previous post is placed below it. You can literally update your blog wherever you are and from any computer.

Blogs also allow readers to leave comments after each post (although bloggers can disable this option). Readers comments, makes blogs interesting, since they allow bloggers to interact with their readers, accelerating the feedback loop and fostering a sense of community.

While blogs started as a tool to publish personal comments and opinions, they have turned into a widely used business tool. The most progressive companies nowadays set up blogs to interact with customers, gather feedback and give a personal touch to business communication. By enabling a "conversation" between a company and its customers (or between employees of the company) blogs engage the company's stakeholders more than traditional, one-way marketing communication methods like advertising and official press releases.

Blogs are also search engine friendly. Since blogs usually revolve around a very specific topic, are updated often, and provide each post with its own URL, they are uniquely positioned to be crawled often by the search engines and achieve high rankings. Also, good, compelling comments attract inbound links, which further enhances a blog's search engine relevance.

Blogs are also easily syndicated. Through a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which comes standard with most blog software, readers can subscribe to your blog, and have your new posts (or an excerpt with a link to the full post) delivered to them through programs called newsreaders (RSS doesn't use email).

There are several good free blog hosts. The most well known is probably Google's Blogger. By signing up with Blogger, you can choose a template, select a few settings, and start blogging in minutes.

If you are new to blogs, we recommend that you sign up for a free Blogger account and give blogging a try.